Family Learning Blog

How Person-Centered Care Is Changing the Senior Care Industry

October 15, 2018 | BY PHS Staff

If you’ve been evaluating senior care services, one term you may have heard is “person-centered care.” What this means is that caregiving isn’t just a series of duties. Person-centered care is a focus on the patient themselves. AtPreferred HealthStaff we treat each of our patients as individuals. Each senior has unique needs and we do our best to accommodate them. Here’s a look at how person-centered care is changing the senior care industry for the better.

Individualized Care

As the name implies, this changes elderly care by placing more of an emphasis on the person being cared for. A caregiver doesn’t just go through the motions. Instead, they focus on what a particular patient needs. This requires listening to the patient and including their family on the decision making process. Person-centered care recognizes that the patient is still a fully-formed person. They just need some help with a few things.

Happier Patients

For the most part, person-centered care can make for happier patients. That’s because they don’t feel as if they’re being treated carelessly. Their caregivers are focusing on their particular needs and responding to their specific issues. Patients and their families can even give feedback to ensure that care quality continues to get even better. These patients and their families know that their input matters. They’re being treated with respect and dignity, and their particular problems are being dealt with by someone who cares.

More Dignity for Patients

Simply put, person-centered care treats patients like people, not just names on a chart. This means more dignity for patients because their caregivers engage with them just as they would with any other person in their lives. An elderly person who receives person-centered care feels like they have more independence, privacy, and autonomy, because they do. They haven’t just been dumped on an elderly care advisor. They have a lot of living left to do.

More Effective Care for Dementia and Alzheimer’s Patients

Person-centered care can be especially beneficial for patients with Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other neurodegenerative diseases. Unfortunately, it can often be harder to break through to these patients. If yourelderly care services provider is just going through the motions, their patients will probably won’t show much of a reaction. An old stigma is that patients with these diseases are no longer “here” and can’t really be engaged with.

Person-centered care tries to dispel that myth. Instead of just checking off items from a caregiving checklist, senior care providers do their best to actually engage with patients. Instead of just dropping off a meal or quietly administering medicine, a person-centered caregiver will talk to an elderly person, make eye contact, and generally just treat them like any other person. When that happens patients, even ones with dementia and Alzheimer’s, do react. Simply treating patients like people can make an enormous difference.

Better Relationship with Caregivers

Person-centered also fosters a better relationship between patients and caregivers. A caregiver treats a patient like an actual person and usually makes return visits, instead of a company just sending over whoever happens to be free at the moment. So when you’re looking for person-centeredsenior care services, contact us at (866) 943-9791.